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In scenes unthinkable during Saddam's brutal reign, religious leaders led thousands of Shiites on a march through the war-ravaged city on Tuesday to demand a dominant role in the future running of the country.
The rally coincided with a meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders that the United States organised in the nearby Biblical city of Ur.
But with the meeting strictly restricted to a list of US invitees and only a few members of the media, the Shiite clerics showed impressive political savvy by exploiting widespread fears that US leaders planned to hijack Iraq's political future.
They also seized on mass agitation throughout Nasiriyah with electricity and water cut off when US soldiers fought Saddam loyalists last month for control of the town still not restored.
"Yes to freedom ... Yes to Islam ... No to America, No to Saddam," the followers of the Shiite clerics demanded at the morning rally.
Later in the day, anger focused on Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Shiite touted as a possible Iraqi president but who has been criticised for living in exile during the hard years under Saddam and for being too close to the United States.
"No, no Chalabi," about 150 protesters chanted in an aggressive standoff with US soldiers who were trying to clear a lane near Haboby Square in the heart of Nasiriyah.
"He came with America to control our country. We don't know Chalabi. We want someone who knows us," one of the protesters, Muhsin Fiadh, told AFP.
Another common theme among the participants at the rallies was their determination to follow the rulings of the Hawza, the Iraqi Shiites' premier college for religious leaders at the holy city of Najaf, 200 kilometresmiles) to the north.
"We don't accept any person or any government, only al-Hawza," local imam Saeed Mohammad Ali Alawi told AFP after the rally.
But while the religious figures stole all the headlines, seemingly every other citizen in Nasiriyah was trying to express their new found freedom to speak openly and dabble in their new art of democracy.
"We need the rapid formation of an interim government," one man declared in Haboby Square as a crowd quickly gathered around an AFP journalist to emphasise that not all Shiites wanted the religious leaders to speak for them.
"We are all Iraqis. There's no difference between Shiites and Kurds and the Turkmen. We are all for the benefit of Iraq. We are all looking for democracy."
When asked what would have happened to him if he had expressed his views in the same place when Saddam was still in power, the man grimaced.
"There was no public opinion in Iraq here. It was impossible because anyone who voiced an opinion that contradicted the government was captured and imprisoned. Sometimes killed."
However the man, perhaps still gun shy from Saddam's rule, was not willing to reveal his real name.
"I am a retired engineer. Call me Abu Ali," he said.
Everywhere in central Nasiriyah people were practically bursting to tell the media of their frustrations and political views.
Through an interpreter, Amir al-Obidi declared he was the president of the Liberal Democratic Party, an organisation with 1,200 followers from a town just north of Baghdad, who had travelled to Nasiriyah to support Chalabi.
Another man who offered to act as an interpreter talked mysteriously of Marxists who intended to return to the pubic arena after years of hiding, and that there were perhaps five new parties in the process of forming.
But whatever their political allegiances, all Nasiriyans shared a burden more pressing than democratic ideals.
Everyone AFP spoke with in the city wanted to highlight the immense suffering caused by the lack of access to water and electricity.
"We have no food, no electricity, no water," Ahmed Jebbar, an English language graduate from Basra University said as dozens of people shouted at him to have their views translated.
"They want to know why the United States makes promises to liberate us when we now have nothing. They say the United States has done nothing to help after causing this problem. This is not freedom."
SPACE.WIRE |